Mod: Book burners are having a rough go of it in the Inland Empire.Religious right gets blindsided by angry parents in a Southern California school district (Yahoo Newslink): Three Southern California school board members backed by a far-right pastor narrowly won election last fall in campaigns fueled by pandemic rage. Then they banned critical race theory and rejected social studies materials that included LGBTQ rights hero Harvey Milk. Now, they’re fighting for their political lives.
After just six months in office, those officials face a recall effort on top of a civil rights investigation launched by the state’s
Democratic-led education department. Students have held protests, and irate parents and teachers are swarming the board’s meetings, feeling that their town — the fast-growing, politically diverse suburb of
Temecula in
Riverside County— has become consumed by partisan warfare.
“We don't want culture wars. We don't want
Fox News appearances,”
Alex Douvas, a parent of two kids in the district who previously worked for two
Republican congressmembers in
Orange County, told the board recently. “Our schools are not ideological battlegrounds. They're not platforms for religious evangelism. These are institutions for learning and growth.”
The religious right saw an opening to jump into the parental rights movement amid intense backlash about pandemic-era school closures and mask mandates. But those policies have all but disappeared in schools, and it’s proving harder to sustain that level of outrage over teachings on race and gender. The effort to ban certain books and challenge curriculum has split
Republicans and polled poorly with independent voters nationally.
Local
Democrats see the strategy flopping — and are already looking to capitalize on it in a part of the state that has become a battleground for control of the
House.
Joy Silver, chair of the
Riverside County Democrats, said she’s intensely focused on winning down-ballot races like school board seats “because the battles are taking place there.”
In Temecula, the political agenda embraced by school board trustees Joseph Komrosky, Danny Gonzalez and Jen Wiersma has set off a different kind of public outrage than was likely intended. The booing and shouting at a recent public hearing grew so loud that the board president — who appeared to be wearing a bullet-proof vest under his sweater — cleared the room.
Mod: DeSantism is on the run in the Golden State. More is to be happily found at the link.
sierramadretattler.blogspot.com
